...except the problem with all of that is this is being driven by idiot savant musicians that don't understand that there's a money grubbing middle man in between them and Spotify. What the artist gets and what Spotify actually pays are two different things.

And that's not even getting into the problem of assigning a reasonable value to a single impression.

On the other hand, MCE was always total pants when it came to outside media handling. This is an area where XBMC is especially good at. XBMC is pretty much the gold standard here. Whereas MCE is a bad joke. Even the (multiple) plugins to address this problem don't do well enough.

Then add in the modern streaming services and it's even worse. They are numerous enough that supporting them is difficult, plus PC options for accessing streaming services are all pretty much terrible (Flash & Silverlight).

Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Hulu and friends all make your cable provider moot. They provide the same interface as what you can cobble together with a Tivo and a really large hard drive.

Tivo and everything else like it was really just a stopgap measure between conventional TV and a full on-demand experience.

It's just the nature of the beast. ANY app that provides that sort of "re-startable" viewing experience is going to have to spy on you just a little. There's no getting around it.

The entire system to support MythTV including full desktop GUI support, the command line, and the IR remote interface system as well as things like database support and a full build environnment clocks in at a whopping 4G. It doesn't have to be a bloated pig.

Your one liner insult is not nearly as impressive as you think it is.

The OP has a point. Microsoft has the resources to push into all areas equally. They can "waste" resources maintaining consistent UIs for a number of different form factors. Certainly for their own products, they can make everything usable with any interface you can mention or even allow for translation layers.

They're just disinterested. MCE is the perfect example of that. It was always very promising but they never really ever committed to the idea.

No. There are any number of use cases on the PC that use or require more horsepower. Gaming is an obvious one. So is the use of bleeding edge media formats. The whole point of a PERSONAL computer is that these use cases can come from anywhere and end up a killer app (like the spreadsheet).

Gut the system and turn the ecosystem into a prison and you sabotage that.

You jest but your proposal isn't so absurd. The Carribean is where old cars from the mainland go after they become too ratty for spoiled 1st worlders. Canadians doing a study there also doesn't seem so strange since my own alma mater has an outpost there.

Besides, there are these things called boats and planes.

While smug vegans are an occasional annoyance, the microfine pollutants thrown off by poorly maintained trucks seem like a much more clear and present danger to you or me. It's always intruigued me why my car's air filter didn't do a better job at masking trucks that smell like they can't pass the state pollution inspection. Just add that to the long list of carcinogens.

It's not just this single issue. It's any number of things. The media latches onto a headlline of it's choosing and wont let go of it. Anything that contradicts the "narrative" is suppressed. The entire news media is a farce (and not just game journalism).

I've seen state ratings that have flatly contradicted my own personal first hand experience.

Plus the "price" of American healthcare is potentially a very misleading thing as others (and myself) have already indicated.

The OP was about lack of transparency in billing and quickly got hijacked by eurotrash trying to repeat the same tired media narrative about socialized medicine and American healthcare. This kind of stupidity is how we end up with "reform" legislation that doesn't address the relevant crap.

People that are genuinely poor have a public option to fall back on.

People that are not genuinely poor are merely confronted with services that are as expensive as the consumer products they willingly indulge in without ever considering the implications.

In other words, you have to go to a lot of bother that really shouldn't occur to begin with. ALL billing artifacts should make sense BY DEFAULT. It should not require extra special diligence on the part of a patient (or any other sort of customer) to get a real bill or see what the real costs are.

The fact that this is not the norm is directly attributable to the "someone else will pay for it" mentality.

I'm pretty sure that the drug that I am on currently isn't allowed by the NHS because it's too expensive. Although it's not just the UK. Our own "public options" have similar problems where expensive treatments aren't covered either.

It gets even better. The doctors that aren't really employees are liable for the actions of hospital employees that they have no control over. The mistakes of a nurse or an anesthesiologist are ultimately on the "outside contractor". He is stuck with the liability and he is stuck paying his own medmal premiums and they are by no means cheap.

That is not "price controls".

That's disallowing hospitals to gouge customers that aren't some large corporation.

Beyond your apparent allergy to individuals being protected under the law, there's the problem of transparency and accuracy that's destroyed by the current hospital billing system. The "rack rate" is a fiction that needs to just disappear.